Classical Lie point symmetry analysis of nonlinear diffusion equations describing thermal energy storage (Q961579)

The authors study a thermal energy storage problem using a linear transformation group approach. The model under consideration is written as \( T^{b}\frac{\partial T}{\partial t}=\frac{1}{r^{m}}\frac{\partial }{\partial r }(T^{n}r^{m}\frac{\partial T}{\partial r})+S(T)\) where \(m=0,1,2\) respectively corresponds to a rectangular, cylindrical or spherical coordinates system and \(S(T)\) is the temperature-dependent heat source term. The main part of the paper proceeds to a symmetry analysis of the preceding equation. The authors distinguish between the cases \(b=n\), \(b\neq n\) and \( b=-1\), \(n\neq -1\). Each case is subdivided in several subcases mainly corresponding to different structures of the source term: zero, constant, exponential, power or logarithm. In each subcase, the authors present the symmetry generators of the associated Lie algebra. Then the authors introduce the variable \(u=\int T^{b}dT\) in order to transform the preceding nonlinear equation into a linear one at least for some choices of the parameters. Thus doing, the symmetry analysis of the final problem is very easy. The paper ends with some symmetry reductions in special cases.